In this first of a series of blog posts, I will take you through the conception of Helios, the thinking behind its creation, and a glimpse at how the core light processing logic was born.

Helios can be said to have started, technically, two years ago when I created a bunch of clouds that I kept reusing across my scenes. They were starting points to which I applied specific settings – predefined formulae for achieving a distinct look for the type of cloud I wanted. But Helios really took form in a hotel room in Los Angeles last year after the Master Class. It wasn’t a moment of inspiration where everything suddenly appeared right in front of my eyes. Nothing that glamorous. But it became apparent that instead of figuring out how to make the cloud library reusable for everyone else inside Vue, a better solution is to create a handling utility.

Dax Pandhi is a CG environment specialist and co-founder of QuadSpinner. He has
contributed to a variety of AAA titles for film and games, including the critically
acclaimed Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome.
He is also a teacher and author with 18 years of experience in CGI.